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Techies On Ice: The Coming Age of Cryonics
Frozen dinner writes: "SiliconValley.com is running a great article about technology workers' fascination with cryonics. From the article: "[the] otherworldly possibility of life after death [tantalizes] techies of all stripes -- mathematicians, physicists, software developers, computer programmers -- who make up a vast majority of those who have signed up for cryonics suspension. The family feud over deep-freezing baseball slugger Ted Williams has only intensified interest in cryonics in Silicon Valley and in the greater Bay Area, already a hotbed for the experimental and controversial process.""
maybe not the best term?
http://www.baarbd.org - bay area adventure racing
Isn't there a problem with ice crystals forming in cells of frozen tissue, which destroy the cells' structure? Wouldn't it be smart to avoid this crystallization process when freezing, somehow?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
"A hotbed for the experimental & controversial process..."
Wouldn't that be the worst place to put a frozen body?
Michael C. Hollinger
One of the main problems with cryo is the fact that the human body doesn't recover well from the damage caused by the deep freeze. Since all water turns to ice in cryo cells get pretty badly damaged causing terrible problems.
I've suggested to our management that we freeze our COBOL programmers. When we needed one, we could unthaw them.
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
Salesmen: Now you see, we're going to freeze you, and you'll be reanimated again in about 100 years
Geek: So, when I wake up, linux will rule them all, and microsoft will be selling leisure suit lenny?
Salesmen: Uh, yeah, sure, leenux. Here, just sign away your stock options from IBM, and we'll take care of the rest
Geek: All right, just like Futuroma! Psycho robots and big-tittied one-eyed chicks here I come!
First, any possibility of future revival is speculative at best. Second, we know that freezing a body at these temperatures causes immense damage to the tissue. (This is why we don't have "deep-freeze" suspended animation.) Third, the financial viability of these firms is questionable, leaving one to wonder what happens to the remains if the company goes under. Maybe it's just me, but it sounds like a huge waste of money.
Me, I want to be cremated and have my ashes quietly put into Bill Gates' breakfast cereal. My last message to Microsoft: "Eat Me."
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
What happends when you wake up 2,000 years from now attached to the body of a goat? Whose to say these ice houses won't be bought out be a company that is genetically engineering a new form of pet that can regale you with stories of the great Internet crash.
On the other head, waking up on top of a genetically engineered body sounds like fun.
Here's a thought. Today you pay for the freezing, but isn't the thawing going to be much more expensive? How do you pay for that?
First of all, I think it should be illegal to Cryofreeze good athletes, like Ted Williams. What will stop a crooked couple in the future from stealing some of Ted's frozen Dna, implanting it in themselves, and then having a child who will become a base ball superstar and make them Millionaires. If they are going to cyrofreeze really good people there should be lot's of government security to prevent people from Dna theft. Becuase that is immoral and human cloning.
Normal people on the other hand should be able to get frozen.
in a capitalist society.
Let's assume the technical problems are solved..
As long as the service of being cryogenically preserved is a commodity, unsubsidized by the government or most insurance, the rich, prominent, and powerful will be the people self selected to undergo the service.
These people will also set up bank trusts, etc. to preserve their interests as they lie dead and frozen. They will influence politics to preserve their property rights as they lie dead, concentrating more and more property and political control in the hands of the dead and their trustees.
I can even imagine the trusteeships being battered back and forth in the marketplace, as the companies that control the wealth of the dead compete with each other.
All in all a fucked up scenario. What do people think about existing or prospective national and international law to deal with this problem? Mind you, I'm partial to the belief that either we have to live in a differnet economic system, or we must make cryogenics a state supported medical service available to all - decided by lot, democratic selection, condition of health or some other scientific standard.
...a whole new meaning to "chilling with your homies"
seriously though...if they never figure out a way to bring someone back (and I'm betting they won't...) what do you do with all those bodies...?
What is your Slash Rating?
Yes, remember in "Forever Young"?
Mel Gibson had those blood clots, and he'd make cool faces, fall over, and get back up 5 years older?
that could be frozen and their job performance might improve...
Well -- AFAIK, there has not been much research dedicated to "bring back life to cyrogenically frozen heads".
All the while, the heads are getting more and more expensive to keep around, and if they were ever brought back to life, I would imagine there would be some serious bill left to pay. (like Valentine from Cowboy Bebop)
However, It is probabbly more interesting to note that this honestly is not much different than people of the ancient times burying their bodies in particular ways, adorned with jewery, in the hope of another life to come. Our case it has simply shifted the hope from a mysterious entity or belief in a higher order of the universe to ourselves and our competence in shaping the future.
All the while, maybe after several million years, future archeologists will come, find a head in a vat, and muse over the silly-ness of the past.
p.s. they should shoot the vats into space. natually cold, and probabbly survive much longer if the world was to end in our own hands. I am certain when WW3 rolls around, the last thing on people's minds is to keep some silly dude's head preserved in liquid N2
My life in the land of the rising sun.
What possible motivation would any future society have to thaw these people out? Why would we need more people, especially those who can't accept their own mortality?
Sure, you'd thaw out one or two just to show you could, and you'd probably thaw out the interesting people like Walt Disney. Hey, you might even pull a person or two out of the fridge every so often to do historical research (wouldn't that be great -- you wake up in a room with a history grad student who asks you to explain why your generation felt it necessary to fuck the planet seven ways 'till Sunday and leave it for later generations to clean up).
Getting back to my original point, I don't see how this sort of thing would ever effect more than a few tens of people over a long timeline. Simply put: the future doesn't want you.
Personally, I believe that the cycle of life is the only thing that drives social and technological evolution. The greatest mistake we could make as a species would be to short-circuit this cycle for the sake of our own greedy, short-sighted interests.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Best... cartoon... ever!
Water expands when it freezes. And since 65-70% of the human body *is* water, it seems pretty obvious that freezing (in the conventional sense) isn't going to do the body a lot of good. Think how badly thawed stuff tastes compared with when it's fresh..
...Ted Williams was a great baseball player for the Boston Red Sox, who died last July. Baseball is a very popular sport in the US and Canada, somewhat like cricket in that you hit a ball and run. The Red Sox are a professional team in Boston, Massachusetts.
.400 batting average, meaning more than 40% of his at bats were hits that season. A controversy over what to do with his body since has arisen his death, among them cryogenical freezing.
He was last guy to finish a season with a better than
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
What do people think about existing or prospective national and international law to deal with this problem?
Isn't it obvious? The future is COMMUNISM !!
god damn COMMUNISM
I'm already a floating head in a tank.
As long as somebody scrapes the algae off the sides and tops off the water, I'll be trolling slashdot well into 2525!
Bodies are for 5ux0rs!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
People try to debunk it as much as possible, but in truth, it's becoming more of a reality. Think stem cells. If you can harvest a few stem cells from a frozen body, and then help patch and repair the old body with them, could we not come back from the dead? Of course, as many have already stated, ice crystals screw ya up pretty bad, by breaking cell walls into little bitty bits. But, there are chemicals that help to keep this to a minimum, and, possibly in the future, low enough to not matter. So, cryo is a very plausible possibility.
Of course, i just wanna see Walt Disney die of a heart attack after he's rejuvinated, when he sees what crap his company's gone to. :P
I've hard that once frozen, your veins and internal organs become brittle and break, and they have no real way to combat this...so the only gain you could possibly have is getting a good copy of your DNA, perhaps so they can clone you once they figure that out down the road. Other than that, it's just a bunch of sci-fi folklore.
Wish I could put my ex in one of those, put new meaning to the term cold hearted bitch.
I don't have a life now, how could I get one when I'm dead?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Mmmmm...Otter Pops®.
Technology workers aren't interested in cryogenics so they can live forever - they are just trying to overclock their brains, and good cooling helps!
example.org - powered by Linux!
Of course, techies just like cryogenics because it's the ultimate water-cooled case mod for carbon-based computers.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
My question is:
Even if they manage to bring you back, chances are that they cannot make you immortal. You will eventually die. Again.
Why would anyone want to relive that?
> A disproportionate number of the new recruits
> are in computer-related occupations.
Really? I wouldn't be surprised if today's programmers are regarded as something akin to war criminals in the far future. With the trend of putting "Microsoft Bob" and friends in charge of more and more of our essential social infrastructure, it's only a matter of time before it all falls down.
"You seem to have forgotten how to run your civilization. Would you like to choose a new one?"
I'm not sure I'd want to wake up wearing my "Code Monkey" T-shirt in a world after that crack-up. They'd probably put me on trial.
- Tim
Did anyone else catch the story on the XBOX Security Paper that doesn't seem to be there anymore? Here's the link that's in the story:
p r. html
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020808_eff_bunnie_
to buy that company. Then I can unfreeze the heads and bury them... the last thing we need is more unemployed techies.
Bat: a wooden stick used for striking things.
Freezing: Making things cold.
Is: I forget -- ask Bill Clinton.
That should clear that up. Done and done!
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Others speculate that technology will evolve to the point that a brain can be uploaded to a computer where consciousness will exist digitally.
Eons of human progress later and I'll still wind up back on Slashdot?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Aside from the heated (or icy) debate over whether or not cryonics is a good idea - that is, whether or not there is any hope for ever reanimating a frozen body - there is, in some places, just as heated a debate over whether or not it should be allowed at all.
t m
In France the law states that bodies must be buried or cremated, so cryonics effectively isn't legal.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1870301.s
There was also another discussion on this topic more recently on the BBC's site.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/2133961.stm
The angel in the oatmeal.
Did anyone else see the "Microsoft wont use DCMA" story that briefly showed on the front page, with 3 comments?
4 9&mode=thread&tid=109
The link is http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/08/20422
But it has dissapeared! The gist of the story was the MS wasn't going to use the DCMA to stop some guy from posting security problems, and it even said, "Kudos to Microsoft".
-Baffled
Daniel
My first thought after reading the headline was that, instead of firing workers in a downturn, some conpanies would freeze them instead.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I just saw an episode of Star Trek on TNN about this very topic. The crew come across this old decaying satelite with people frozen onboard. Actually a really neat epsisode, I remember watching when I was a kid and thinking, "This is so cool!".
Read Heinlein's "The Door into Summer." In that book, they've solved the technological issues, cryonics is a part of the culture--people freezing themselves for a decade or two, but not for medical reasons, for financial reasons. The idea is to pre-pay for the cryonics and put the rest of your assets into investments so that you're rich when you wake up. Not to mention that you escape your pathetic personal problems.
It's really because of their faith in technology. They are very future-oriented. They are constantly looking ahead in their own minds to the future.
Put an ancient egyptian mummy in a cryogenics tank. For extra laughs, put those gag nose-and-moustache glasses on him.
Sorry for being offtopic but did anybody notice the story on the frontpage of /. about MS not using the DMCA to stop a MIT student from disclosing Xbox security flaws? I saw it but when I clicked on the story all I got was a "nothing to see here, move along" message.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Dumb.
There's no proof that cryonics works -- that it is possible to reanimate a frozen human body. There's tons of proof that it does not work, that cellular matter gets "freezer burn" pretty quickly and destroys the precious protein chains and complex chemicals that make up life. Yes, even if it's really, really cold. If cryo tecnology can't keep whitefish safe from stinking on a trip to the midwest, how's it supposed to keep you intact for the thousand years it takes them to figure out the solution to cryonic's unfreezing, protein restructuring woes?
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old. That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
These poor idiots...willing to believe in life-after-death simply because it has a clever sci fi spin. Reminds me of an Orson Scott Card novel...if it doesn't make sense, invent physics where it does. Suckered in by the guarantee that "some day" they'll be able to fix everything when globally we can't even fix hunger, joblessness or disease. And even in the event that a cure becomes available, how's the frozen stiff supposed to pay for it? I laugh at the impossible thought of thousands of hopeful, foolish Faye Valentines, indentured to their doctors and their gift of immortality.
If you truly believe in science, learn Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit. Don't place your trust on ice.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
when I was going to school as a student/security guard, I signed a contract to have my head cryopreserved. It only costs $100/month generally. It is not for rich people. You can be poor and be a cryonicist.
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
...are closer than you think. Read some of Niven's Gil "The Arm" stories to see what could happen. (corpsicle is a contraction of corpse and popsicle)
All we need now is perfect organ transplants (no chance of rejection), and these frozen people will be harvested sooner than you could say "raw materials".
-Ed
docbrown.net
Graphic Design, Web Design, Role-Playing Games...all the good stuff
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
If you believe the technology will advance so that any disease can be cured, don't you believe also that they will be able to grow your body again from a DNA sample. Memory, and brains might be a bit more of an task - but saving around 1500 cm^3 and the DNA sample takes much less space anyway. Here's a related article about brain mapping.
especially one who can't stay out of the deep end. We do it because of the social contract: you look out for me and I will look out for you. That is why we save people who have medical problems.
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
I noticed it. Glad to see I'm not hallucinating again.
Why does this just strike me as more techno-geek technophilia? "I'm going to have my body cryogenically frozen" has the same nerd chest pounding tone as talk of CPU clocks, net-enabled everything, and naming children after esoteric SF novels.
Of course that 133 Pentium doesn't seem so much like a Tiny God anymore, some kid keeps on h4x0ring the AC to 5 degrees C, and your neighbors hit the deck everytime they see Undómiel throw on his black trenchcoat.
What is music when you despise all sound?
i have many extropian friends around here and i think they're all just stupid post-death resource wasting wackos when it comes to their frigid idea.
the resources consumed to freeze and maintain their stiffy could be spent to give life to 1000s of needy people elsewhere in the world.
I guess people who don't have a life are hoping they will get one the next time around. Of course, by then their skills will be obsolete, they will run around using archaic phrases like "awesome" and "kludgy," they will bore everyone with their reminiscences and nostalgia for products and fads that no longer exist, and most predictable of all, when they hear the sounds people of the future are enjoying, they will grump "You call that stuff music?"
Wouldn't love to die and wake up on the Enterprise. ;-)
No wonder that techies flock to the new promise of
life after death. They are the ones who lack a life now.
I saw an interesting show on the Discovery channel about 3 months ago.
On the show, researchers put a living frog in the freezer. After a day,
they took the frozen frog out and let it "thaw" out. I was amazed
to see that the frogs heart started to beat again(after an hour or so).
After several hours it was moving around again! I think if researches
could harness this wonder, we may have the potential to "really"
utilize cryogenics for something useful (i.e space exploration?)
and not for freezing people that are already dead!
....and vitrification? maybe you had better find out....
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
I want the name "Abby Normal" inscribed on my cryo-tube.
My refrigerator broke down while I was out of town last week all full of dead things (beef, chicken, etc)... nothing really reanimated but the stench still lingers.
If you do go cryogenicking, I would suggest a Maytag (with an oncall repairman).
come on fhqwhgads
>> People who are so afraid of death or who feel their lives weren't long enough need therapy to cure their over-inflated feeling of self-importance. >> If you run when you see a bus coming at you on the street, maybe you just have an overinflated feeling of self importance?
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
Why do all these people wanting to be frozen assume that a world of X billions will want to thaw out some sick crank from the past just to add to their burdens?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Also, when the singularity comes about, it will presumably incorporate all available entities that increase its information. The heads on ice would be a valuable source of historical data.
If this technology is ever perfected (or made good enough), it would be extremely useful for space exploration, although it would probably be obseleted by any warp drive-like inventions.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I've seen the terrible consequences of cryogenics gone wrong one too many times.
Throwing yet another pack of spoilt hamburgers into the trash
Count me out.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Ummm.... you all do realize that the entire cryonics industry is a plot conceived by time-travelling cannibals from the future to ensure an endless supply of TV-Dinners....
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
The colder it is, the fewer chemical reactions take place in the cell. A cell whose molecules aren't bouncing around doing anything doesn't need food to maintain its current state.
'samatter, didn't you see Ice Age? :-)
I play Nerd-Folk!
We have legal medical marijuana, we're allways lookin for better ways to cool the smoke :)
.______________
O
o
the information that is "me" (stored in the brain) is still recoverable, and as science advances, that information may well be recovered , and I will live again, hopefully.
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
I have a better idea:
Upon my death, I will be immediately cremated, then turned into a sticky, ashy paste and pumped into an old-school hand pump fire extinguisher.
Then, my mother (the only one in my family who's both crazy AND loyal enough to do this) will proceed to track down all my enemies and hose 'em down with eau du Phil while cackling madly.
Freezing's boring. Posthumous gross-out revenge is FUN!
Phil
So what happens to your memory while you sit in your TV dinner package for the next 100 years. It's not like we can just put all of our knowledge and experience in a jar and open it up when it comes time to thaw out. Physically your body exists but whose to say that your thoughts will come along for the ride. Without that there is no reason to come back to life since you would basically be newborn in an old mans body trying to figure out what hell all those flying objects are.
>There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old
I went to a funeral service for someone who was being put into cryonic suspension. It was unlike any I had been to before. Everyone sat around a piano and sang "freeze a jolly good fellow, freeze a jolly good fellow..."
...giving those needy people all of YOUR assets. Go ahead, help yourself. I am waiting....
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
But if it ever works, it's probably going to be more like recovery from backup onto new hardware than a restart.
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old. That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
... a full twenty years (24%) longer than the hard limit you suggest. My family is hardly unique in that accomplishment.
Wrong.
There is no proof that the sun will rise in the east tommorow, though I think most of us fully expect it to.
However, there is ample proof that humans can live well beyond 75 years. There have been humans that have lived as much as 150 years, twice the hard limit you suggest. Indeed, my own grandmother lived to 101, and lived fully independently until she was 98. My great grandmothers on both sides made it into their mid-nineties
Cryogenics may or may not pan out. I think it is far more likely that the energy, or money, will run out and the freezers will be shut down than that anyone will be revivied, but even if the probability is only one in one billion that a frozen human will ever be revived, that is infinitely greater than the probability of someone buried in the earth, or creamated, ever returning from the grave, Christian, Islamic, and other assorted mythologies notwithstanding.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
These people need to read "A world out of time" by Larry Niven. It shows quite clearly that you don't want to be thawed by the people of the future.. (But they'll probably just use whatever still works of your body for transplants anyway..)
You know what? It's a beautiful sub-scalding day in Florida and I'm leaving the office early to sit under a live oak and do some asanas. Blow your money on cryonics or enjoy this day--it's your choice.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Cryonics fans generally assume that the Miracle of Nanotechnology will solve this, just like everything else... Now, while I can buy nanotech fixing up whatever caused death in the first place, and I can sort of buy its rebooting a brain that's been offline for centuries, I find it a little difficult to accept that they'll be able to reconstitute a mess of meat shredded at the molecular level.
If you have nanotech, you should be able to rebuild the body to any degree you like, atom by atom.
I personally think that we aren't likely to reconstitute the frozen bodies. A solution requiring less miraculous technology would be to slice up the brain and map out the synapse connection patterns and strengths to load into a computer-emulated brain. This would require very hefty amounts of computing power, but if we were reviving people at all, we'd be at a point where we had the resources necessary.
I'm not hopeful for the frozen, though. Firstly, between the time you die and the time you're frozen, I strongly suspect that the brain will likely have degraded to the point where most of the critical information in it has been lost. Secondly, I'm doubtful of any cryonics company keeeping its frozen members stored under the required conditions for the century or two they'll be waiting for revival.
...then likely have few burdens. Why? Because the level of technology needed to revive cryos is high compared to today, and so therefore people of that future era will have extremely high standards of living. AS far as what you think the future might be like, think for yourself. Don't rely on what you see in the movies. Movies and fiction need conflict in order to have an interesting story....
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
Take what you think about technical knowledge of one generation above you and raise that to the power of 6.
People won't even understand why you don't understand a word they are saying. They probably would assume you are brain dead when you don't even respond to a simple call like:
1000 1011 1011 0110 1010 1001 1110 0110 1011
1001 1000 0100 0010 1001 0001 1010 1010 1010
1101 0011 0010 1001 0001 0101 1001 0101
God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. T. Jefferson.
>There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old
The documented record is 122 years, more than 60% beyond 75. And she was a smoker.
I suspect most people who get themselves frozen are well aware that they won't be revivable tomorrow. They've decided not to bet against future technology.
Seems more constructive, though, to unravel why calorie restriction extends lifespan in every species where it's been studied, from worms to rhesus monkeys, and keep the current body as long as possible.
....BILLIONS of days to sit under the trees of a MILLION planets.
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
So, sometime down the road, when the world has more people than it can support (assuming the population continues to grow), I'm supposed to believe they will want to bring some of us back to life?
Even if you accept that it might be technically possible to revive someone who was frozen (more like rebuild at the microscopic level), why would anyone 200 years from now want to do that for YOU? So you have lots of money, and people to manage it to finance rebuilding you when it becomes possible, why would they want to, since they control the money and power at that point?
It's a silly idea, and a very sad one. Something for people with a very large ego, too much money, and too little humility about their place in the world.
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old.
Besides the people living into their hundreds?
That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
On the other hand, there's decent evidence that evolution doesn't drive most creatures to have long lifespans. Gorillas live to about 35; chimps can reach their late 50s - I think it safe to assume that our most recent common ancestor lived at most into its 50s. Considering that evolution added 40% to 100% to the max age in a few million years, and with life expectancies in the 30s for primitive man, there's no reason to believe that it was biochemical cutoff instead of minimal effect on natural selection that stopped the increase in max age.
What now?
All your friends are dead (save for the ones who were frozen, probably not many), your stuff is long gone, and your money...well, I haven't heard of any of these cryogenic companies socking away cab fare for their clients. What bank would preserve your accounts while you're technically dead?
My point is, yes you're thawed and alive, but your life basically sucks. And nobody knows you, or cares about you. Suddenly immortality doesn't sound so appealing...
Was that out loud?
Sure, we there is a problem with ice crystals. Sure, we haven't actually brought anyone back. Heck, maybe the companies that offer this service won't survive until these discoveries are made. Maybe it will never be possible to bring someone back from the dead that were frozen with today's primitive techniques. Even if it is, why would our decendents do it?
Then again, you're dead. Any odds are good, don't you think?
And don't forget the $300,000,000,000 bill (including interest) Having to become a professional bounty hunter isn't too appealing.
Matt
On a more practicle level, every bit of evidence suggest that man is gaining a stronger and stronger ability to have atomic level control of matter (read nanotech or molecular tech pubs that show that this is the case). This would imply that if sufficient structural characteristics are preserved, even if the brain that was frozen was not resusiscitated, that all the memories and resident personality could be replicated into a new body, or even construct (read Neuromancer).
However, to blindly ingnore a set of possibilities because it cannot be proved today seems short-sighted (unless you are still upset about the whole Santa Claus thing :) )...
God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. T. Jefferson.
If we could thaw someone today who
was frozen 100 years ago (a tech
geek from 1902). Why would we.
I don't need to meet someone who
was in their prime in 1877.
You just have to suck all the magic out of the world, don't you?!!
That damn meme has more truth in it that reality does!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Atheists only! You can either die and become wormfood, or pay $120,000 (likely through life insurance) and have a chance of waking up hundreds of years after your death in what seems like a regular nights sleep. Sounds like a decent wager to me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I learned everything I need to know from Vanilla Sky.
Count me in!
"Failure of Windows operating systems is extremely rare. If it happens, it is usually due to operating system file c
Let's consider a couple of points.
1) In my lifetime alone, conditions for working people have deteriorated significantly. I have no reason to believe that they will be better in the future, so in some ways I feel lucky to have been born when I did. Perhaps, death will actually save us from a future we wouldn't want to be a part of.
2) Assuming the future isn't that bad, and they manage to revive us without serious complications, still, is it a good idea? What if we don't have any fun in the future? What if no one likes us? What if we don't fit in anywhere and end up crazy cat-ladies, stuck in our apartments, waiting for the weekly grocery shipment from Welfare, Inc? Nah, thanks. I'll die when it's my time.
3) On the subject of life after death, why doesn't anyone really think that one through? Think about it -- it might be fun to be eternally alive for the first few dozen years, but eventually you're going to run out of things to do and talk about. Let alone how boring the super-religious type's vision of heaven is -- i.e. we all just float around clouds with little harps and bibles, and gaze upon God all day. I love God as much as the next person, but spending eternity looking at him and doing nothing else? Good heavens. How awful. So, really, the more I think about "eternity" the more afraid of it I become. When I die, will I be forced to hang around heaven forever, nagged by holy types for wanting to look up the robes of hot dead chicks? If I sneak behind a cloud with some fox, is some dead Baptist going to start hassling us and pounding us with his wooden cross because we're getting some action? I mean, really, it sounds like a big drag.
The only way heaven would appeal to me (and don't get me wrong, it's possible that it could be this way, and given that God is supposed to be all knowing and all powerful, there's no reason why it wouldn't be this way) is if heaven is like a city with suburbs, universities, and a gigantic, free public library so you can spend eternity reading books if you want. I'd go straight to the library and almost never come out. Except to try and talk librarians into bed, but then, maybe there's some of that in heaven too.
But barring that possibility, really, what good is forever? If you can't have fun, and have your environment change and develop continuously, you're going to get bored fast. Seriously.
I wish I knew what heaven was like or whether it exists. Right now, I'm forced to live my life wondering whether I'll die and just be dead (ok by me), die and go to boring heaven full of baptists and religious nuts (Oh, HELLZ NO!), or die and go to groovy heaven with neighborhoods like "Stonerville", "Bookworm way", "nymphomania Ave.", and of course, "Playstation Place" (All, right, sign me up!).
Living in suspense sucks.
I just wanted to take the chance to burn some karma and plug the miniwebsite I advertise in my sig: Dealing With Mortality: A Skeptic's Guide or: Kirk's Big Fun Pages O' Inevitable Death. From the lead paragraph:
Coming to grips with mortality- this is the biggest personal issue that every one of us will have to deal with. It can be especially difficult for people who don't believe that there's an afterlife waiting for them. To contemplate the end of our selves in this world is frightening; to not convince yourself that there is life after this world requires a special kind of bravery. This site is here to try to share the thoughts that have allowed me to understand and accept the situation.
I went through a time when I was thinking about Cryonics. And other times when I've gone through paralyzing anxiety about death in general. This site is the result of all that, and might help others in the same boat.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Does that mean I can overclock him?
CRYONICS is a bunch of semi-rich idiots who took their love of glycerol-soaked popsicles too far. See here.
PLEASE keep the distinction as there are a lot of meaningful applications for CRYOGENICS and just a market for liquid nitrogen companies in CRYONICS.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I saw on discovery about frogs that completely freese solid and then come back to life after winter. If they chemical they create can be duplicated (not sure if it was just glucose) we could be frozen without any cell damage being done....anyone know why flies can be frozen?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In an attempt to cash in on the popularity of cryonics amongst techies, CryoGen Inc. of San Fransisco are now offering a caffeinated blood-replacement coolant.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
The article assumes that the customers of Alcor are after an experience of the "afterlife". I'm a techie, and I have no "otherworldly" beliefs. No ghosts, no afterlife, no god. I'm unsure as to how many of the techie customers are after the "afterlife", or the future world they hope to wake up in.
I bet at least a few of first to be thawed get to work finding themselves the fastest computer they can.
And a copy of Quake3.
And some Kleenex.
Well... Wouldn't you? Just for old time's sake!
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
Money. Your savings will be growing exponentially while you are frozen and this will add up to an enormous amount if you either start out with a lot of money or are frozen for a long time. Consider a simple case where your savings are making a paltry 3% per year above inflation. If you stay frozen for 100 years, your savings will have multiplied to 20 times their original value and since inflation is already taken into account you will have 20 times the purchasing power that you would today. If you stay frozen for 200 years, your savings will grow to 370 times their original value. If you stay frozen for 500 years, your savings will grow to a whopping 2.6 million times their original value, and again, that is already adjusted for inflation! Just include a clause in your cryo-contract that your maintainers will get 50% of your savings when they revive you, and they will have the motivation to revive you once the decreasing cost of reviving somebody intersects the increasing real value of your savings.
So, if you put a mere $1 into a relatively safe investment and froze yourself today, you could wake up in 500 years and be rich (a multi-millionare in today's dollars). I'm surprised we haven't seen any get-rich-quick schemes touting this aspect of freezing yourself (well OK, it would be more like a get-rich-in-what-you-perceive-as-quick-since-you'r e-frozen scheme).
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
I think the greatest obstacle is the damage done by freezing. I don't care what their advocates say. If you destroy ever single cell in your body (when the water expands and solidifies, cracking all your cells), there is a MASSIVE amount of repair to do. "We can rebuild him", indeed, Mr. Austin. Can you think of the technology required to create nanodevices which have the *specialied* ability to repair the unique characteristics of every different type of body cell?
And then there is the problem that actually killed you that you need to have repaired. And that not all freezing techniques are not done in whatever "special way" which will be discovered later for something like this to even be attempted.
Further, all the electro-chemical reactions have stopped 100%. Has anyone revived a brain that was 100% "brain dead" as seen on a EEG? Nope. Oh. Looks like someone will have to discover what makes that "spark of life" in the brain. And that whatever they end up producing is still YOU.
And frankly, if they could bring back frozen people, then they'd be just as likely (if not more likely) to reanimate people who have been dead for a few hours.
And you'd hope that society will continue to evolve technically and medically. And that their deep freeze. And the company doesn't go out of business. And that the legal system doesn't reclassify them as medical parts which can be used for other purposes since they are dead (cyborg, transplants, research, whatever). And that people decide that those 90's and 00's guys were really cool enough to bring back en mass. (Yeah, right.)
And even then, you're buying a number of years in a world that you are completely inept to understand and for all practical purposes will be worthless after the novelty wears off in a year (assuming they are able to revive you in a way that doesn't leave you brain damaged or in a poor quality of life). And then you're going to die anyways.
It just isn't worth it. If they paid me $100k, then I might be tempted to let all the people around me in my life go through the inconvenience of my being frozen (are my assets tied up, or distributed as normal?). Oh, and what a legacy I would leave behind. "Yeah, he was that nutball who had his head frozen. Hahaha."
I'm sorry. It just doesn't work for me.
"in the future, you may not want to get head"
By the year 3000, we'll have the technology to keep human heads alive in jars, even those of people like Nixon ;-)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I signed up for cryogenic preservation. With such a controversial topic, I'm not surprised at the number of comments here on /. that just poke fun or deride those of us who've made this choice. I would invite you to learn more about the process before passing judgment.
In my case, I signed up to preserve only my head and my spinal cord. This is because those are the only two organs that contain information that cannot easily be replicated/cloned/reproduced in a lab. Assuming advances in nanotechnology and genetics, other organs/body parts could be grown from my own pre-existing genetic material. The process is cheaper and more sensible than freezing a whole body. After all, why revive a body if you could potentially start with a new one that lacked the ailments of the previous one?
There are a lot of preconceptions regarding the preservation process. Organs aren't frozen in *ice* but in liquid nitrogen, and they freeze so quickly that the cellular damage caused by "freeze burn" described by a few in this forum are close to nil. Additional damage is prevented through chemical treatment of the organs prior to preservation. The problem is thawing, not freezing or maintaning the body in a preserved state. Now, by extension of current techniques, it might be possible to accomplish this thawing in a not so distant future. Haven't you heard of viable frozen eggs, sperm, and embryos used in fertility treatments?
Yes, there are a lot of "ifs" in these assumptions. The promise of cryogenic preservation is not one of immortality but one of an extension of life. Those of us who've chosen to be preserved are simply betting that the odds in the future are good to be revived. Sooner or later we'll die without recourse. On the other hand, if you're buried or cremated, the odds of revival are zero.
Our biggest concern is not whether the science to revive us will be there; we're assuming it will be sooner or later. Our real fear is that some religious zealot in the White House or Congress may introduce legislation that will prevent us from applying science and technology to that purpose, much like they try to prevent stem cell and cloning research.
Cheers!
X (anonymous this time, sorry)Sigh. Newbies always have the same questions..
You're betting that your consciousness is totally phyiscally based. All a special combination of molecules with electrical and chemical reactions. Nothing more.
You're also betting that, with a little repair and a jump-start, your consciousness would continue from the moment it left off. YOU would still be YOU. (I wonder how important the ONGOING electro-chemical reaction is to consciousness.)
That is what you're betting on, after all, when you bet on cryogenics. Further, if you believe that the chemical and electrical is all there is to a person, then there isn't much point in bringing you back. Because you will finally be dead not too long after, and you don't matter anymore because you cease to exist.
So, if you believe that you will cease to exist, but that it is important to have a long as life as possible, then cryogenics is for you.
That seems to be the opposite of Pascal's Wager, isn't it? You're betting $100k+ that you will cease to exist.
Personally, I'm a fan of the meat-puppet theory. These bodies exist, and the brain has a purpose in interfacing with this physical world, but *I* exist elsewhere.
So those who have no life in this one are lining up to have no life in another?
Maybe they'll come back as strippers?
"Your suns and worlds are not within my ken, I merely watch the plaguey state of men."
"These people will also set up bank trusts, etc. to preserve their interests as they lie dead and frozen. They will influence politics to preserve their property rights as they lie dead, concentrating more and more property and political control in the hands of the dead and their trustees."
There's an easy fix to your dystopian scenario...
Join them.
Or get your butt to work on revival and repair technology *NOW*, so they don't accumulate too much power. The shorter they stay under before they can resume their lives, the better off you will be.
-- Terry
Take it to the next step: Just copy minds. Brainwash someone into reading/believing all the Slashdot/Usenet posts that were written by some guy a couple thousand years earlier. They become the earlier person.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Drexler a "respected theorist"? More like a well-known charlatan and snake oil salesman! His rediculous claims about Nanotechnology lie somewhere between a those of a "alternative therapy advocate" and a scientologist. The idea of a "universal assembler" that can "build anything from scratch" is so absurd that it's hard to believe that purportedly intelligent people would fall in. Do you really think that it's possible to make cute little robots, built out of atoms? If so, then perhaps you need to learn about basic chemistry and physics, something Drexler apparently forgot!
The fact is, there are way too many naive technophiles willing to believe in technology is a religion rather than a science. If you want get frozen, fine. Just don't expect to be woken up again, because you aren't going to be woken up, anymore than the Egpytian Pharohs were.
NB: I'm posting anonymously because I know some stupid technocrat is going to vote me down for insulting his/her religion.
It won't matter in the slightest, and after you're gone we can forget all about you. Wait, we can do that anyway.
And then there is the problem that actually killed you that you need to have repaired.
Smithers: "Mr. Smithers plus guest"...huh. There's only one person I would want to bring.
[pulls a frozen Mr. Burns from a slot in the wall]
Oh, Mr. Burns, we'll thaw you out the second they discover the cure for seventeen stab wounds in the back. How're we doing, boys?
Frink: Well, we're up to fifteen!
Scientists: Yay!
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=37656& threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=126&mode=thread&pid= 4035584#4035703
Except for the $120,000 part, of course.
if you are not frozen then there is 0 (!ZERO!) .000001% chance is worth a long shot...after all? what else are you going to do (you can't take it with you eh?)
probability of revival...even
simple...check out www.cryonics.org for more details
"Techies On Ice: The Coming Age of Cryonics" Is this like the Lion King on ice?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
"This? This is ice. This is what happens to water when it gets too cold. This? This is Kent. This is what happens to people when they get too sexually frustrated."
This article? It's about cryonics. This is what happens to people when they get too rich, too dead, and then too cold.
lots of uninformed opinions today...read this site for real details and form your own opinion
http://www.cryonics.org/ted.html
What good does it do to freeze someone after they die of some disease in hopes of reviving the person once a cure is found? Even if the cure is found and you unfreeze the person with no cellular damage or whaterver -- the person is still dead! Applying the cure don't do any good -- they're dead. A person can die today of a disease for which there is a cure and it won't do any good to apply the cure after the poor bastard dies because THEY ARE DEAD. And I doubt that death will ever be a reversible condition.
Actually, we're all *already* frozen. The reason that the world's OSes seem more bug-and-sploit-ridden,ungainly and defective with every major new release (witness, for instance, XP and the 2.4.[0-7] kernels) is a direct effect of Jory.
- undoware.ca
People are "killed" and their blood is cleaned by machine. "Flatlining" means no brain output, here.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
" These bodies exist, and the brain has a purpose in interfacing with this physical world, but *I* exist elsewhere."
Remember to always use SSH, not telnet to connect to your body, and even so, keep that SSH patched up-to-date and watch the security bulletins!
graspee
This article should have been titled Smart People On Ice (a la Real Genius) but of course this is /. and the smart people are few and far between.
If you have a heart attack and your heart stops in the middle of Borneo with no one else around, you are dead. If you have a heart attack while undergoing minor surgery in a hospital, you very well may not be dead.
If you die of old age and are cremated, you are dead, because the information in your brain has been randomized beyond recovery.
If you die of old age, and are frozen, you may not be dead. If you make to the future 1000 years from now, you probably will not be dead, because the information that is in your brain and that constitutes "you" has not been randomized, so therefore, it may be recovered.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
That was an excllent article. It's rare that one reads something that's so balanced. Those interviewed really summed up my feelings; it's a gamble, but the cost is so small compared to the payoff. I doubt it will work, but I'm yet to be convinced it's impossible.
I had no idea the Bay Area was such a hotbed of Cryonics. Any other Alcor members out there?
coljac, "A-1868"
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
Sure, it may be possible to freeze something that's alive and thaw it out and have it come back to life. One thing about all these people that are beeing frozen in the hope that their cancer or whatever can be cured is that they are DEAD! It's not like they were alive and frozen, they're all frozen after death. Not only do we need to find a cure for cancer for them but then we need to revive them from death.
waste of money. move along. nothing to see here.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Space travel comes to mind... What if it's possible to freeze someone BEFORE they die? And what if that's easier than getting a spacecraft going faster than the speed of light (and having the crew survive the experience)?
On the other hand, there's decent evidence that evolution doesn't drive most creatures to have long lifespans
A fair bit of (theoretical!) work has been done on this topic in the last decade or so. Frankly I'm too tired right now to go look up the references, but I've been to a couple of population genetics seminars by people active in this area. The basic upshot is that the "aging process" (as measured by the inflection point in the curve describing the age-linked decline in metabolic function, repair efficiency, etc) for a given species tends to kick in at about the age of the average lifespan of that organism in the wild.
Humans in the wild presumably lived on average around 30-35 years before being snuffed out by cave bears, infections, or angry neighbours. There's no advantage to being able to live efficiently to 200 years if you're already dead at 35, so natural selection doesn't operate to keep your body in peak form for that extended time. If you suddenly develop a mutation that allows you to live to 200, it doesn't help any of your descendants a bit, since on average they are all dead at 35 as well.
One fellow even worked out a rough calculation for how long it's going to take natural selection to notice that we're living much longer on average, and for our descendants to start living longer on that basis (this was done by extrapolation from (IIRC) fruitfly data). Be of good cheer: 30000 years or so from now, people will be living much longer. :)
Of course we might come up with some biochemical hacks in the meantime to stretch things out, but I'm not holding my breath...
I'm serious; I am truly surprised by this thread's outpouring of fear and revulsion at the very idea of cryonics. "Won't work, you'll be ground hamburger. Even if it did, nobody would revive you, you sicko egomaniac."
I haven't signed up, but I'm interested. Along with a few others here, I figure that if it doesn't work, I'm dead anyway. More than that, I'm optimistic about my chances, but I'm not going to argue that here. What I *will* argue is that I am neither avoiding living now, nor arrogantly imposing myself on an unwilling future society, any more than anyone who takes advantage of a risky lifesaving medical procedure.
Would you tell a cancer patient who is about to undergo an expensive treatment regime with little chance of success not to be such a selfish bastard , to die already, and to leave the money to charity?
I suppose some of you would. Sheesh.
But not in SV; in Houston.
A-1856
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
The oldest of them are hitting college this year or last year: the first birth from a previously frozen embryo happened in 1984. So, we can freeze and bring back at least a few cells without water cracking them. Not the same thing as 70 trillion cells (100 billion of which containing intricate connections i.e. neurons), but its a start.
Here is an interesting test related to this topic:
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/games/identity.htm
Anyway, I am confident that the technology will exist in the future to reverse the cooking and freezing processes and bring this bird-and-a-half back to life. With nanotechnology and the Chicken Genome Project, who's to say what might be possible?
...mathematicians, physicists, software developers, computer programmers...
;)
There's a difference? Isn't this like saying "mathematicians, physicists, botanists and people who study plants"
It makes me think that people really don't know what computer programming is.
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
Civilization would have to fall far for liquid nitrogen production to fail- you don't need electricity to keep the dewars cold, you just need to top them off each week.
Of course we might come up with some biochemical hacks in the meantime to stretch things out, but I'm not holding my breath...
Why? Humans could also evolve a stronger response to bacteria based on antibiotics. But humans took a short cut, instead of waiting for evolution to design it. Ageing is certainly more complex, but especially after we can tweak the genes, it should be a similar matter to shortcut evolution.
What possible motivation would any future society have to thaw these people out?
...)
I can think of a few who might be interested.
- History departments. (Benjamin Franklin wanted to be pickled in a wine barrel after death and revivied in a century or three to see how things had come out. Wouldn't you like to interview HIM? Or see Jefferson's reaction to what the Democratic Party has become? B-) There's been a lot of history since then and eyewitnesses can help sort it out.)
- Techie version of above: Anyone trying to fix a bug in a frozen programmer's code. B-)
- Political splinter groups of many sorts.
- Charities. (If you will donate to save a random starving child in Africa, would you donate to revive someone you knew or had heard of from your own history?)
- The entertainment industry. (LOTS of possibilities there...)
- Hobbiests. (Imagine the science-fiction convention you could have with every currently-dead author and fan in attendence... B-) Now do the same with civil-war recreationists, yachtsmen, skiers, archers. Want Karate lessons from an old master?)
- Previous revivees. (History department revives historical figure, who revives his wife and children, who revive their fellow cryonics club members...)
- Anybody with a bit of money and a bee in his bonnet. Do you have any idea how RICH (by current standards) the poorest of the poor would be when tech is up to reviving people frozen by current techniques? Try this: Think of the standard of living of a current welfare recipient - food - including imported fruit virtually year-round, medical care, recorded music, cable TV, electricity, etc. Now imagine how rich someone in 1812 would have to be to afford the equivalent. (Remember: No penicillin, no refrigeration, entertainment is live and rare for anyone less than a king,
and of course:
- CURRENT cryonicists, who will revive PAST cryonicists in the hope that FUTURE cryonicists will revive THEM. (Just because they can repair somebody who died of cancer in the naughties doesn't mean that they'll be able to keep people from dying from Arcturian Whooping Sneeze in the '80s. So there will likely still be cryonicists.)
Why would we need more people, especially those who can't accept their own mortality?
"... can't accept their own motality."? Sounds like you're believing pro-death propaganda.
We know damned well we're mortal. But that's no reason not to "Rage at the dying of the light" - and then see about repairing or replacing the lightbulb - as many times as possible.
Do you WANT to die? You can ALWAYS arrange it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Oh, I don't think it's impossible at all. I'm just not optimistic in the near term (say, 30-40 years). In the long term (>50 years) I actually think it is almost a certainty.
Maybe it's just a forest-for-the-trees effect, but working in a biochem lab I'm constantly struck by the gigantic complexity we're faced with in the metabolic processes of even the simplest cells, and by the sketchy nature of our understanding of the overall picture right now. This is not to put the field down - we know orders of magnitude more now than we did even a decade ago. The (real) work on the ageing process has only just begun, however.
That being said, there are a couple of hopeful threads. Some real progress is being made on understanding the nature of the caloric restriction effect, and it seems like the idea of a simple pill which mimics the effect isn't completely out of the question.
Personally I'm sure it will come out about five minutes after I die.
"Dammit! We had to suffer, let them suffer too" seemed to be the reaction from older generations of doctors. Some anti-cryonics people seem to be saying the same thing "We had to accept death, we had to suffer, no one gets to try to skip it." But why should death after after 80 years (121 the longest provable lifespan) be acceptable? We are starting to know about how lifespan works, why not try to extend it? In the past, when death after a few decades was inevitable, societies needed to come up with rules and ideas that kept people from wigging out over death. But you don't need the exact same rules if death doesn't have to happen in the same way.
Maybe 50 years ago it was noble to teach a young child to accept their upcoming death by leukemia. Nowadays that would be considered almost child-abuse, because childhood leukemia has a 95%+ cure rate. I think it is terrible when a child suffers through years of chemo and cancer treatment only to die- I see little that is noble about it. but I see little that is noble about death for anyone, and I don't believe we should give in just because "thats the way it always was." Living to 80 would look good to people who could only expect 40 years, and I wouldn't have wanted my ancestors to say "we only got 40 years, why should you have more?" Why shouldn't I think that 160 is a fine goal for next generations of people?
And I doubt future generations of people will resent the frozen few to the point of refusing to treat them. Why? For the same reasons we today don't resent our "past generations" from getting heart transplants or stroke treatments. In part it might be pragmatic- refuse treatment for the elderly and you might not get treatment yourself- but I think mostly it is because we want to be kind. We don't tell people- "hey, you're eighty now, that's all you get, you have to die." I don't know that future people will say to the cryonically suspended "you lived 40 or 80 years, thats all you'll get."
... where a corpsicle wakes up and finds out that society has confiscated all assets from the dead, and raises the question of who would want to reanimate those barbaric savages from bygone days. Pretty interesting, though in America I'm sure you could set up a foundation or other corporate entity that would keep track of your dough.
A minor thought- Ok, what if you could slap somebody on ice and thaw them out later or even go a step further and prolonging death through cryo and curing the person in the future... What if you could? Great, you wake up in the rosey future, right? Uh-uh. Ed, the Nuclear Physicisist gets frozen and wake up in a future where his skills are useless. It took him the good part of 40 years to become an expert in his field only to find out that in the year 2280, the only place nuclear reactors are used is in cheap import hover cars from Alpha Proxima. Welcome to the future, where the only field Ed, the 6-digit salary guy with all his mocha-latte degrees is qualified to work in is as a glorified auto mechanic.
Not everybody would suffer this fate, of course. But anybody with any technical skills (from cars to software) better be prepared for a nasty case of chrono-shock. Then there would be those people who are curosities, who would have it made in the future. Lets freeze Elvis or somebody... He's always good for a laugh. A president who could give you first hand accounts of the history he shaped. But you and I? Better keep walking past the good ol' cryo tube and live life in the here and now.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
No thanks- I saw Vanilla Sky. Say it with me now: "Tech support!"
One of the often asked questions about Cryonics is why only about
600 people are signed up.
Many have said here that they oppose it. I am curious about the
reasons in particular you are not signed up.
Many who are signed up don't think reanimation is particularly
likely. They see all the risks, all the undeveloped technology.
They might feel that their estimation of the chances of it working
are one in a thousand or less.
Yet they are signed up because, simply put, the odds of success
if you don't do it are absolutely and surely zero, barring
religious faith in a non-material immortal soul.
If you don't do it, you're food for worms and permanently dead.
If you do it, you may also be permanently dead, but it's hard
to argue that you can be really sure there is no chance.
We simply don't know enough to say that it will work, but we
also don't know enough to say that it won't work. Predictions
that it will surely work as as doubtful as other famous early
scientific speculation, but predictions that it surely won't work
are as valid as the similar negative predictions that "experts"
have made over the years. Most were right (so far) but many were
also wrong.
We do know that when you take frozen brains and examine them
under the electron microscope that all the structures that modern
science believes to be important are still discernable. The
information about the connections is all there. The connections
are damaged of course. Many cell walls are ruptured, many dendrites
are sliced, but it's still clear what they were connected to.
If I cut a PC-board in half, the circuit would be ruined, but I
can certainly re-solder it, or build a new PC board and put the old
chips on it. The information is still there, and so it is with
frozen tissue. This is a matter of fact, not speculation, so to
say it's impossible to repair this seems nonsensical. Hard?
Certainly. Expensive? Quite possibly, though if it's all nanotech
and software it's only expensive to do it the first time. But
impossible? That's an extraordinary claim.
You might speculate there is more to the brain then the position of
all the neurons and how they are interconnected and all their receptors.
But that would be pure speculation. Science doesn't yet know enough about it
at all, not enough to say what can or can't be done.
So given that, why take the alternative of certain death over any chance,
no matter how slim? Is it the money? Is it that people are grossed
out?
Of course there are many things that could go wrong. The company holding
you could fail. (Though storing you is remarkably cheap. All it takes
is a liquid nitrogen truck once a week to top up the tanks.) The world
could change so that your descendents, friends or curious people have
no desire to revive you. The world could change to a place you are
incapable of living. Could. None of these are certain either. That
being cremated is final -- that seems pretty certain.
So what's your reason?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I know you're being funny, but maybe there IS a parallel to what you are saying. My personal belief (which is NOT scientific) is that there is a "key" that links your consciousness with your body (meat puppet).
Normally, the correspondance is very tight. However, it can be weakened (identical twins with a common lock on some pieces), or it can be insecure (a more generic lock with some pins missing in the tumbler), causing a multiple personality disorder.
Of course, if someone things this is hokey, then putting faith in the religion of technology is at least equally as suspect.
Seriously. Imagine you die, and then you wake up in a totally immersive VR world that doesn't have to obey the laws of physics. How easy would it be to convice people that they're in heaven? (Or hell...) Still, without a physical form or any attachment to the "real world" I think I might just get bored after a while and put myself back in statis until they've built me a robot body.
(Of course, none of this takes into the count the massive damage freezing does to human tissue on a cellular level, especially the extremely delicate stuff that makes up your brain.)
the greater Bay Area, already a hotbed for the experimental and controversial process
The Gay Bay? You're fucking kidding, right? What, the Village people wanna get frozen? Maybe Jeff Gordon? Do the homos think it'll let them come back when there's a garunteed solution to bleeding from the anus after rough sex? Fuck that. I ain't going that way. Mortality is what makes life fun ^-^ Cryonics is a good ST:TNG episode (The Neutral Zone).
"A paperless office has about as much a chance as a paperless bathroom."
What are you talking about man? Of course we'll have a paperless bathroom one day... we'll all switch over to using the seashells!
I'm not hopeful for the frozen, though. Firstly, between the time you die and the time you're frozen, I strongly suspect that the brain will likely have degraded to the point where most of the critical information in it has been lost. Secondly, I'm doubtful of any cryonics company keeeping its frozen members stored under the required conditions for the century or two they'll be waiting for revival.
Didn't any of you fuckers see Vanilla Sky?? There's so much shit that can go wrong with freezing your head, that odds are something tiny will go wrong and leave you with a fucked up fate far worse than death...
Any remote thoughts of freezing myself when I die got nipped in the bud with that film...
But anyway just try to imagine... what if death is the most horrifying sensation that a human could ever experience. The most traumatic halucinations/pain/whatever. (This isn't an unreasonable assumption, considering it happens when everything your body is malfunctioning to the point of failure. All the alarm bells going off, red alert sirens, all that shit.)
The good part is, that people who experience it, only experience it for a few seconds, and then they cease to exist. And that's the end of it. Now if you go freezing your dumb ass, you have the possibility to experience DEATH, and then "wake up", and have a full memory of the most horrible terror that the living can never know. Add to that the fact the even the smallest little "error" in the freezing/thawing process is likely to cause major mental changes to the way your brain works, and it's unlikely your perception of reality will be anything close to what it is now. And odds are, it won't be modified in a good way.
Imagine being one of the guys who is in charge of handling the newly thawed heads... It would seriously fuck with YOUR head if every person you brought back to life begged you to smash that ice pick into their skull and finish them off... stop the horror please!
Of course, that's just one way of looking at it. You'll probably just awaken in a new paradise, with your head attached to the body of an olympic athlete, to a world where all disease and conflict has been eliminated. A joyful paradise where everyone is happy and lives forever. That's probably what will happen, right?
The article talks about paying enough money to cover the 'freezing process' and the storage of your body, but it doesn't mention where the money will come from to re-animate these people, or cure them of their diseases, or hook their brains up to cameras and microphones. These procedures will cost much more than the actual freezing and storage of them, I'm sure.
Is that taken into consideration? If these people do become the first candidates for any human tests of reanimation (which it seems like they would) maybe the process would be funded by the researchers. But, I don't think I'd like to be in that situation...That sounds REALLY frankenstein...
-Frostilicus (ctar)
----- Cryonics: gateway to the future?
www.cryonet.org
This post is protected under the DMTA (Digital Millemium Trolling Act). It is illegal to moderate it as a troll.
Note that no biology or chemistry types are listed as those interested in cryonics. That's because they understand that mammal cell structures cannot withstand the process of freezing and thawing.
but there is some problems, Somebody who is dating actually calista flockheart, I'm sure you know him, It's han solo, it worked well for him, why not me ???
My guess is you would not want to be thawed out if the future really sucked.
What if you were thawed out only to discover you were being thawed to shovel the shit of a new master alien race. And they had the technology to keep you alive forever perfoming this slavery. That would suck.
the brain is the substrate into which consciousness acts.
cryonics has a religious belief that our sense of Self in somehow built-up from the interaction of matter amongst itself.
however --
Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world.
For every attempt at an explanation must begin with the formation of
thoughts about the phenomena of the world.
Materialism thus begins with the thought of matter or material processes.
But, in doing so, it is already confronted by two different sets of
facts: the material world, and the thoughts about it.
The materialist seeks to make these latter intelligible by regarding
them as purely material processes. He believes that thinking takes
place in the brain, much in the same way that digestion takes place
in the animal organs.
Just as he attributes mechanical and organic effects to matter,
so he credits matter in certain circumstances with the capacity
to think.
He overlooks that, in doing so, he is merely shifting the problem
from one place to another. He ascribes the power of thinking to
matter instead of to himself.
And thus he is back again at his starting point.
How does matter come to think about its own nature?
Why is it not simply satisfied with itself and content
just to exist?
The materialist has turned his attention away
from the definite subject, his own I, and
has arrived at an image of something quite vague
and indefinite. Here the old riddle meets him again.
The materialistic conception cannot solve the problem;
it can only shift it from one place to another.
(Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 2)
best regards,
john.
I live a couple of miles from Ellis Island. Ellis Island has an amazing museum. Give it a visit some time.
Tens of millions of people gave up most of their stuff, said goodbye to all their friends and most of their family, and got on boats. The boats usually worked, and they built new lives for themselves and their families.
Many of them couldn't even speak the language when they got here. I expect, if I am cryonically frozen, that I'm likely to wake up in an English-speaking environment (with 100-300 years of change, but I can handle that much language change).
In fact somewhere around 80% of the population of America are descended from people who did this voluntarily, plus another 10% who were forced to do it against their will.
It's your life and your choice. You are welcome to get yourself buried or cremated. Just don't interfere with my choice, just like you wouldn't interfere with my choice to move to Japan next month if I wanted too.
I seriously considered signing up for Alcor but decided that for the time it takes to earn all that money, I would be better off spending that time in a gym or on a track, improving my life span through exercise. When I get older I plan to sign up though.
Maybe they would wake you because they needed a good laugh?
And then there is the kind of altruism you can do without.
On waking, someone tells you, "I have some good news and I have some bad news.
"The bad news is that we can't cure your cancer.
"The good news is that everyone on Earth has FOUND GOD . We are all going to live eternally! Those Heaven's Gate people from your own time were on the right path. Since eternity is around the corner, most of us have chosen to be promoted over to God's care.
But we just couldn't leave you and the other corpsicles to spend eternity in hell!
So we have been thawing you out to tell you the good word. It is amazing!
"Oh, you are still in pain? Oh, sorry, what with one thing and another we weren't able to get any painkillers out of storage for you guys.
"But I better get cracking here at page one, chapter one, of the first book of our new holy writ. If I read really quickly I should be able to finish the first book, and get you baptized, before your cancer polishes you off.
"No, don't try and thank me. Seeing you in Heaven is all the reward I need."
You can use that money to buy the last can of anchovies or something.
that that is is that that is not is not